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Celebrating the Colonial Williamsburg journal's 30th anniversary

Autumn 1978 - Autumn 2008

by Mark Jacobs

1978’s inaugural edition led with a word from the Foundation president, beginning a tradition still observed in today’s issues.

In twelve black-and-white pages, with a touch of
brown, the first issue of Colonial
Williamsburg appeared in autumn
1978. It contained shorter pieces
but just one feature article, by
Ivor Noël Hume, then called the
resident archaeologist of the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation.
Thirty years later, the Colonial
Williamsburg journal, the foundation’s magazine of popular history,
runs to eighty pages, with four color illustrations, nine or ten
feature stories, and an equal number
of fixtures. It mails to over 100,000
readers. And Ivor Noël Hume is
still writing for the journal.

In the mid-1970s, when Roger
Thaler was hired as Colonial Williamsburg’s first vice president of
development, he suggested that
the foundation needed a regular
publication that spoke to donors’
interest in eighteenth-century
history, in Williamsburg and farther afield.

People had long asked for
such a publication, Charles Longsworth, then president of Colonial
Williamsburg, said in the first
issue, and Thaler decided that the
time was right. To serve as editor,
he enlisted Tom Schlesinger, a
veteran journalist and brother of
the historian Arthur Schlesinger
Jr., though then, as now, many
hands made each issue possible,
from writers to photographers to
curators, archivists, and office
staff.

The journal remained a
twelve-page, black-and-white
publication until 1983, when the
economic summit of the then G7
met in Williamsburg, attended by
President Ronald Reagan, Prime
Minister Margaret Thatcher, and
other leaders, and a longer, full-color issue was published to introduce Colonial Williamsburg to
the delegates and to those in the
wider world who may have been
unfamiliar with the institution, a
format and size that became the
permanent look of the journal.

The magazine has covered
colonial history and Colonial
Williamsburg in detail and depth,
from the making of nails in the
Historic Trades forge to the making of a nation in the House of
Burgesses, occasionally turning
back to precolonial times and forward to the twenty-first century,
as well as outward to Europe and
the rest of the world. The fixtures
highlight events around the foundation, from recent art acquisitions to Historic Area programs,
and include regular items such as
the president’s message and Wit,
Mirth, and Spleen.

Contributors have ranged
from Colonial Williamsburg experts to professors of history, art,
and archaeology. Having written
for the majority of issues in the
past thirty years on the discoveries of archaeology and colonial
history from Canada to Bermuda
and beyond, retired head of archaeology Ivor Noël Hume will
again appear in the next issue.
Retired vice president of collections Graham Hood continues to
write articles that explore the
fine and folk arts of the colonial
era.

Winner of two Emmy Awards
for television documentary writing and professor of English at the
University of Maryland, Michael
Olmert has covered the more modest structures of Williamsburg
life, from kitchens to dovecotes.
More recently, James Axtell, professor of history at the College of
William and Mary, and Anthony
Aveni, professor of astronomy,
anthropology and Native American Studies at Colgate, have supplied pieces for the magazine. In
time for the four-hundredth anniversary of the establishment of
Jamestown, the foundation published a collection of magazine articles that had appeared through
the years, 1607: Jamestown and
the New World.

During the three decades of
the journal’s existence, the magazine has had three editors—Tom
Schlesinger and Wayne Barrett
were the first two—and a small
number of full-time staff: Sondra
Rose, Brenda DePaula, and Su
Carter, in addition to the current
staff. The masthead shows how
many others in the foundation are
essential to putting the magazine
together.